O Brazil leads the ranking of most innovative companies in Latin Americaaccounting for more than a third of the companies listed in the third edition of the study State of Innovationfrom Visa, released this Tuesday (15).
Also according to data from the survey, companies in the country tend to have more partnerships with startups and are more likely to have a direct or partial investment – which may justify the push to digitize businesses locally.
The survey was conducted by Americas Market Intelligence (AMI) from May to November 2021 and involved the evaluation of more than 100 companies in Latin America based on five pillars of innovation: internal support for innovation, external collaboration, execution, use of technology and scalability.
Participating companies were classified into five stages of innovation: initial, developing, intermediate, advanced and natural/mature innovative. The study included interviews with CEOs, COOs, CTOs and company founders.
Investment in technology and innovation
The study points to a clear development and acceleration in terms of innovation and technology in Latin America. While in 2020 companies are focused on migrating to mobile and digital channels as a result of the challenges presented by the pandemic, the survey for the last year shows that, today, companies are on another level: that of working to solve structural barriers that get in the way of scanning.
Thus, the percentage of participants who were classified as in an “advanced” stage of innovation grew in what was considered the highest high, rising from 17% to 23% compared to 2020.
In addition, the average number of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) of the companies surveyed also increased by 53% compared to 2020.
According to this year’s study, the 30 most innovative companies in Latin America form a very diverse group. Digital natives represent 46% of the total, while traditional issuance, trade and acceptance accounts for the remaining 54%, demonstrating that many older organizations have reinvented themselves by adopting innovative models.
Considering the technologies with the highest investment in the period are those focused on bringing improvements to security and those that enable good customer experiences. In this sense, biometrics, tokenization and Artificial Intelligence (AI) for fraud detection were the technologies with the biggest increase in use (74%) last year compared to 2020, with facial authentication the most used application (63%).
AI is also being widely applied, in conjunction with machine learning (ML), to understand your customers more deeply and create personalized, individualized experiences. AI usage has increased across all entities surveyed in the past year, and nearly all of the most innovative companies have adopted AI and ML to some extent.
